And definitely not that the college kids these days literally don't read and occasionally don't know arithmetic beyond the middle school level.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

https://www.kpbs.org/news/educ...

It's totally not anything within one's own control. It's absolutely the outside forces conspiring against you.

Almost makes one admire the stereotypical millenial liberal arts grad slinging coffees or flipping burgers. At least *he* didn't think he's too good for gainful employment that may be outside his formal training.

Other than collecting that sweet sweet chinese and/or russian money in exchange for "raising environmental concerns," that is to say, the rabble rousing, what is the actual fucking deal about a building full of computers?

Plenty of nitpicking. Plenty of bluster, insults, and "if you don't already know I don't owe you an explanation" but zero articulation of why you actually don't like buildings full of computers.

Almost like you actually don't care, but just enjoy a good witch hunt.

Okay genious. List any reason other than "well other people are hating on it so I have to" for why a building full of computers is an existential threat to our freedom and prosperity. Any reason at all.

It's a building full of computers.

Not the prettiest thing, but also not the devil's own workshop either.

Oh but it steals the water!...How?

Oh but it hikes up our electric bill!...No more than any other industrial user would.

Oh but it invites children into its gingerbread house!...That almost makes more sense than the other stuff they're saying...about a building full of computers.

Instead of copy-pasting a postdoc or grad student's verbiage as her own she cut out the middleman and cheated all by herself.

Much better in my opinion than copying off of someone else's cheating and claiming it as your own. We're not animals after all.

An incident comes to mind from about a decade and a half ago when I was in grad school and our research group was collaborating with a university on the wrong side of the planet.

One of their postdocs submitted a progress report that was almost completely copy-pasted from emails and powerpoints we had sent his way and claimed it as his own analysis. SOP over there if you pay attention to the way they write and present at conferences. Lots of focus on perfecting the form. Original work...not so much.

Film at 11.

Okay lefties, here's a good analogy for you:

Eli Whitney believed the cotton gin would make slavery obsolete since it would automate away the then-most labor intensive part of the cotton harvest. It had the opposite effect. Removing the bottleneck lowered the cost of cotton products and increased demand for cotton.

The dream of idle riches was always dreamt by people who didn't understand where whatever measure of material prosperity they had came from. In their imaginations it may as well have been a magical goose laying golden eggs, not the hard work of talented people.

Right-leaning hoi polloi imagined themselves stumbling upon such a goose as God's reward for hard work and moral rectitude. Left-leaning hoi polloi (and "intelligen"tsia) imagined a tophat-wearing capitalist hoarding for himself the goose that rightfully belonged to ThePeople(TM).

You dipsticks were suspiciously silent, masked up, and taking a knee back when the woketards were running slightly more wild than they are today.

First they came for the magats, and I said nothing eh?

I voted for a dem once. 20 years ago for Ed Rendell because he wasn't batshit crazy and his republican challenger was comically unserious (before it was cool). Never again. A guy likr that couldn't make it to the top of the ticket on your side anymore unless he pinkieswears to let the barbarians through the gate to get that sweet sweet dsa organizing on his side.

In such a scenario, I would be (and have been) compelled to vote for my side's barbarians.

What's better? Unloading half our bombs on some towelheads on the other side of the planet in exchange for $4 gas or having the force of the state compel a cultural revolution at home?

I can deal with $4 gas without developing the urge to murder the hr guy at work.

Pft. Real programmers...I mean real lawyers write their filings with a quill while wearing a powdered wig.

I'm not saying I'm in favor of sending the wayland/systemd/gnome3 crowd to gitmo...but I'm not saying I'm necessarily against it either...

Seeing as it puts you at the mercy of the people who make your stuff for you.

History, both recent and not so recent, repeats this lesson again and again.

Only a matter of time before it becomes possible to decode people's internal monologues remotely.

Or just train yourself to think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts, thin unsexy thoughts...

Maybe it's the onset of middle age taking over from knee-jerk skepticism talking, but at this point I firmly disbelieve in total any PR materials invoking any hot topic in the news, lefty news, righty news, and nominally straight news alike.

I went to school 20 years ago and everything was (then still-alive) solaris/bsd or (then new) Linux. University web infrastructure, engineering school computer lab thin clients, etc.

When I started work, it was a little different, but the same effect. Most of the legacy systems were from the early 90s and made for solaris or hpux. And by the time it was time to port to a more modern os, us new kids naturally gravitated to the path of least resistance and least licensing costs. That was either pure oss linux or (eventually) red hat, which by virtue of being intended a mass market product competing or complementing purley oss solutions, was loads cheaper than something (by then) niche like a vendor-supplied unix system.

Windows got skipped over for everything except desk machines.

Now it's 20 years later and us greenhorns are turning into greybeards who've never in our careers seriously considered doing anything serious on windows.

Studying superstition as an anthropological curiosity is different from studying it as a theory of the universe with predictive power.

It is useful to understand the general outlines of crazy. It is far less useful the expend effort at becoming crazy.